How do you Define Business Process Management?

Enterprise architects, business solution providers, and project managers all define BPM in different terms. Arjun Thomas has used wikipedia’s definition of business process management in his post today, which reads:

“Business process management (BPM) is a method of efficiently aligning an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility and integration with technology. As organizations strive for attainment of their objectives, BPM attempts to continuously improve processes - the process to define, measure and improve your processes – a ‘process optimization’ process.”

Do you agree with this definition?

Appian and Mega Partner to Bring Together BPM Tools and Enterprise Architecture Software

Yesterday I wrote about this partnership between these two companies on this post on our Evolve EA blog, and I figured I share the news along here as well. eBizQ reports in this article that Appian, a provider of BPM techonology, and Mega, a provider of EA technology, have entered in agreement to join the BPA and EA capabilities of the MEGA Modeling Suite with the Appian Enterprise BPM Suite and the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-delivered Appian Anywhere platforms.

This new partnership is aimed to improving enterprise success in process innovation and building on existing deployments of software with joint customers such as Enterprise Rent-A-Car, AXA Investment Managers, General Dynamics, and the Department of Homeland Security. Users will be able to perform archectiture and process design on the Mega Suite and then export processes directly to the Appian BPM platform to map out direct management of operations.

Lucio de Risi, president and CEO of MEGA mentions:

"The combination of MEGA's powerful BPA, simulation, and optimization functionality with Appian's robust and scalable BPM platform will unite business users and analysts with enterprise, technical, and information architects in the common goal of creating adaptive, process-driven organizations."

Reliance Capital Adopts BPM

In recent news, detailed here at CXO Today, we find out that Reliance Capital will implement BPM across their enterprise, spanning all their divisions including mutual fund, life insurance, general insurance, Reliance Money, and consumer finance. They will use Business Manager 7.0 to implement this new company wide business initiative. Also included in their new pursuit of BPM will be their BPM Center of Excellence, which will find a way to identify and rank importance projects into solutions across the businesses subsidiaries.

Is BPM Automation Possible?

On Saturday Avinash Malik, an enterprise architect from Microsoft, wrote an article explaining his view on automated BPM, and how despite the “hype”, it can never be truly automated. His theory states that about 15 to 20 years ago, organizations started developing BPM, and working this new concept into their budgets. This led IT developers to develop unique languages, namely BPMN or BPEL, in order to create software His opinion is that people think that with these developments it would be possible to save costs and not keep any IT developers on staff. The problem with this thinking, as he states in the article is that,

“We can automate a small number of situations where coherent activities, in sequence, are performed entirely by computer. Certainly, we want these situations to increase. But the overall impact on the cost and quality of IT-developed software is minimal. And if we are not addressing the cost and quality of IT software... why even discuss BPM automation?”

Other experts have already added their opinions to the fray as can be seen by this post from Bruce Silver, who has a different opinion. Another post that discussed Malik’s opinion can be found here. What are your thoughts on the pros and cons of BPM automation?